Various mirror sites of The Pirate Bay have sprung up since the site’s disappearance, but this one is different. Some alternatives simply provide a copy of The Pirate Bay with no new content (many proxy sites have been doing this for years). Others, like thepiratebay.cr, go further and even provide fake content as if it was new and even attempt to charge users.

The Old Pirate Bay, on the other hand, doesn’t claim to be a resurrection of the site, even though based on searches we conducted and files we tested, that’s exactly what it has managed to achieve. This is much more than just a working archive of The Pirate Bay; it has a functioning search engine, all the old listings, and working magnet links. New content is being readily uploaded and downloaded.

The funny thing is that the new site was built and hosted by Isohunt, a potential Pirate Bay competitor. The Old Pirate Bay is a useful site, too! Instead of just mirroring the original, the Old Pirate Bay has a functional search engine, working magnet links, and all of the old pages. To boot, there’s even new content being uploaded all the time.

It’s hard to guess what the company’s intentions are for the Old Pirate Bay, though it sounds sincere enough in the announcement:

As you all probably know, the beloved Pirate bay website is gone for now. It will be missed. It will be always remembered as the pilgrim of Freedom and possibilities on the Web. It’s the symbol for a whole generation of the internet users.

In it’s honor we are making oldpiratebay.org search. We, the Isohunt.to team, copied the base of the PirateBay in order to save it to the generations of users. Nothing will be forgotten.

So torrent on, you freedom-loving scallawags. Because you can take the Pirate Bay off the web, but you can never destroy the pioneering site’s legacy. [Isohunt via Venturebeat]